Letter from the Editor: It’s never been as fun, or as tough, being a journalist

Given some of the horrors perpetrated by the British press, particularly the tabloids, over the past few decades, any attempt by a journalist to call for sympathy is liable to be met with derision. But looking back over the past week’s news agenda, it’s impossible not to be struck by the challenges to this profession, whether existential or temporal.

Of the former, the decision by The Sun to reverse its online paywall – in effect, pulling it down – shows that when it comes to making money online, we’re all still working it out. The internet is, of course, much more an opportunity than a threat to anyone who works in the media, but it has ripped asunder the old assumptions about what it is to be a journalist, or indeed a publisher, today. It’s also demolished our revenue streams by changing consumer behaviour forever. That’s even before new technologies such as AdBlock disrupt our business models, just as they begin to settle down.

Then we come to the new, more topical threats. On 29 October we had an excellent scoop on Page 1: a court order had been issued, allowing police to seize the laptop of a Newsnight journalist, and look at electronic communication within a certain time frame. In recent years, the principle that a journalist’s sources should be sacred has been demolished. I spoke to a senior BBC figure on 30 October who said his strong sense was that the Terrorism Act “changes everything”. As we report, it’s now not just journalists but academics who are feeling the full force of the anti-terror police’s suspicions, as a result of new legislation.

Further afield, ahead of Turkey’s election on 1 November, the offices of opposition media have been raided by riot police. We sent Foreign Journalist of the Year, Patrick Cockburn, to find out what’s really happening there.

Finally, if you’re the kind of geek (like me) who stayed up to watch the latest Republican presidential debate on 28 October, you’d see that the one thing uniting all candidates was hatred of the media. In vast swathes of modern America, journalists are now considered guilty until proven innocent. It has come to something when the party of Lincoln and Reagan commits to the belief that there is a conspiracy against it, turning journalists into scapegoats as a matter of habit.

In other ways, of course, this is a golden age for the media, with more people having more access to more information than ever before. And yet the challenges are multiplying. We just have to keep producing journalism we really believe in, and find enough people willing to pay for it, and the business models to fund it. On which point, I very much hope you enjoy this edition.